Analyzing a Scene: Hitchcock and the Male Gaze
There is a scene in Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953) in which the leading lady played by Anne Baxter descends an outdoor staircase to the man she loves waiting below. Hitchcock uses a tilted or Dutch angle camera shot to show the descent and he slows the motion of the camera down so that Baxter’s movements are more ethereal and less ephemeral: she remains in the frame longer than would otherwise be natural and the viewer is invited to gaze upon her loveliness all the more. It is a titillating and beautifully shot segment, framed perfectly to capture the brilliance of Baxter, the outdoor light, and the sensual movement of her descent in a stylized and romanticized manner. As Goffman notes, framing is everything in cinema: it allows the camera to “locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its limits” (8). By use of framing, lighting, slow motion, and camera angle, Hitchcock is able to convey a very deliberate message of beauty, love, harmony, and wonder to the viewer—all in Baxter’s descent down the staircase. However, as Mulvey pointed out, this technique of filmmaking can also be understood through the theoretical framework of Mulvey’s “male gaze,” which highlights the way in which women are portrayed on screen for the sole purpose of giving male viewers pleasure. From this perspective, there is a cultural meaning to Hitchcock’s scene, especially when it is analyzed within the context of the film’s plot and the context of the culture at the time the film was made. This paper will analyze this scene in I Confess and show how it communicates an effective plot point in the film (the development of love between the two characters) and uses the visual image to generate sympathy in the viewer while simultaneously relying on the male gaze in a way that promotes scopophilia, as Mulvey calls it.

In the film, a priest played by Montgomery Clift hears the confession of a murderer. He is bound by the seal of confession so he cannot tell the police who did it. The police begin to suspect that the priest himself is the killer, as there are clues that point to a motive: the man killed was a blackmailer who had information on the character played by Baxter. It turns out that Baxter and the Clift had had a relationship before he became a priest and the blackmailer was regularly receiving payments from Baxter to keep it quiet because she was now married to a dignitary and did not want the information to get out. To help convince the audience that Clift’s priest could ever have a...…“realistic” and would abandon the stylized camera work of Hitchcock, presenting men and women in much different aspects and reflect a more modern view of the male-woman relationship that would in many ways disregard the male gaze. For Hitchcock in this scene, the male gaze was exactly what he was trying to win, which indeed he does succeed at doing.

In conclusion, the scene in I Confess in which Baxter descends the outdoor staircase is one that conveys a certain message to the viewer and helps to move the plot of the film along in the right direction. It is also a scene in which the male gaze is deliberately called upon to help Hitchcock achieve the effect that he desires: he wants the viewer to understand how Clift’s character could fall in love with Baxter’s character at an earlier point in their lives. The stylized way in which he frames the moment she comes out of her home to meet Clift’s character helps to convey an idealized image of womanhood that “sells” the moment to the viewer. However, it is this act of “selling” the image that the Feminists of the later decades would oppose as they felt it projected a culture of servitude that women no longer wanted to promote. Hitchcock’s scene thus serves as an example of a point at which everything was about…